Pornography and the brain

A reader sends a news story that confirms what I’ve heard myself from priests: pornography is a huge, huge issue in the confessions of men. If it’s that big in the lives of men who are spiritually engaged enough to go to confession, how much bigger an issue is it in the lives of everybody else?

Excerpt from the story, which appears in a Catholic magazine:

Pornography’s addictive strength is a result of long-term, sometimes lifelong, neuroplastic changes in the brain. Psychiatrist Norman Doidge, author of the best-selling book The Brain That Changes Itself (Penguin, 2007), writes, “Pornography, by offering an endless harem of sexual objects, hyperactivates the appetitive system. Porn viewers develop new maps in their brains, based on the photos and videos they see. Because it is a use-it-or-lose-it brain, when we develop a map area, we long to keep it activated. Just as our muscles become impatient for exercise if we’ve been sitting all day, so too do our senses hunger to be stimulated” (108).

With pornography, in other words, our brain’s pleasure system that excites our desires is activated, but there is no real satisfaction. This explains why users can spend endless hours searching for pornography on the Internet.

Doidge further notes that porn viewers develop tolerances so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation. Thus, they often move to harder, more deviant pornography.

But there is a dark side to this phenomenon of “neuroplasticity”: unhealthy behaviors are just as likely to alter the brain as are healthy ones. Addictions are a prime example. “All addiction involves long-term, sometimes lifelong, neuroplastic change in the brain,” says Norman Doidge, psychiatrist and author of “The Brain That Changes Itself.”

In his book Doidge catalogs some amazing stories of personal triumph, but he also discusses how neuroplasticity can be hijacked by one of society’s most pervasive addictions—porn addiction. “The addictiveness of Internet pornography is not a metaphor,” he says. “Not all addictions are to drugs or alcohol. People can be seriously addicted to gambling, even to running,” he says. So why not pornography? “All addicts show a loss of control of the activity, compulsively seek it out despite negative consequences, develop tolerance so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction, and experience withdrawal if they can’t consummate the addictive act.” Porn addicts exhibit all these qualities, he says.

And the numbers support this diagnosis. According to Online MBA, 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn Web sites. And in the U.S. $2.84 billion is spent on pornography yearly. And as with most addictions, the habit has intensified over time. Society’s taste in pornography has skewed further and further towards the extreme as internet porn has become more widely accessible: “Hardcore pornography now explores the world of perversion, while softcore is now what hardcore was a few decades ago, explicit sexual intercourse between adults, now available on cable TV. The comparatively tame softcore pictures of yesteryear—women in various states of undress—now show up on mainstream media all day long, in the pornification of everything, including television, rock videos, soap operas, advertisements, and so on.”

The more you entertain vice, the more hard-wired into your personality vice becomes. That’s not just a teaching from religious sages. In the case of pornography, at least, it’s neuroscience.

I was in court yesterday, and one of the matters that was heard involved temporary orders to be issued in a divorce case. The mother accused the father of having inappropriate material on his computer, and said that the father admitted to going to bookstores to look at pictures of naked children.

The commissioner noted that pornography is everywhere in our culture, and his job now is to determine whether the pornography is “mainstream” or is “deviant” (and may therefore lead to dangerous behavior with the parties’ children.)

Having already shot my wad on this subject ten thousand times – and what seems like times as many a year and a half ago back at both you-know-who’s well-stroked old blog back at BeliefNet as well as my own former venue – I can only say this post feels for all the world like a…homecoming for me. Let the wounded virgins whose earnest howls of the eternally damned constitute an Ivory-pure percent of the Greek chorus in these precincts by all means join the finger-shaking wet-blanket old-maidism – both avowed and smuggled in as claptrap “science” – that set the default tone for such debates. I have no revisions of my own to add, and even if I did my busy hands, as of 4:50 Eastern, are already far too tired to type as it is.

You’ve gotta stop this stuff. In the morning, my screen gets covered in coffee. In the evening, it gets covered in wine. It’s a damn good thing I don’t watch web porn. I’d be going through a monitor a week!

DSL.: I did ask you not to say ‘mattress’, didn’t I? Now I’ve got to stand in the AmConMag Spam trap. (he gets in the trap and recites) ‘Much have I traveled in the realms of porn…Bliss was it in that dawn to see a live webcam…I schwing the booty electronic…’

Dan McCarthy enters.

DM: Oh dear, did somebody say ‘mattress’ to Mr Lahti?

Our thanks to the BBC. The telly folks, not, wink, that other kind that might find itself innuendo or possibly mine.

“Why are your hands too tired to type, son? Heh.”

I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never Kippled. Whoops, wrong joke…You of all people, Sir, having been over my shoulder for at least half of it (s’truth!) all the liveblog day, ought to know better:

1. My almost-record number of comments here today.

2. Trying to get a call through dozens of times round 4pm to the busy phone-line of my mechanic, after leaving my ’93 Camry at his garage at 7am, the better to get the estimate made necessary after my brakes gave out on me last Wednesday and I had to stop the car a dozen times over the ten-mile drive home by coast-slowing well ahead of time to below 10 mph before shifting with a jolting thud into PARK.

So yes, I just typed in here from every other November 15 comment thread and my TracFone touchpad and boyfriend, are my hands tired.

I can’t imagine what else The Talented Mr. Dreher had in mind, regarding what Hamlet might have called “handy matters.”

Porn is a tough habit to break. Shortly before I became a father I resolved to kick it. I didn’t want my kids to ever stumble across that stuff and have the horrible moment of realizing that dad was a dirty old man. So I turned to the BVM and the rosary. Prayed it every day for months. It worked. Been porn free for over 2 years now. After 20+ years of being a “user”, I’m free.

Congratulations, James! The Blessed Virgin will not let you down. A guy who talked to my marriage prep class said he had the problem and kicked it similarly through a novena.
I heard a priest say that he doesn’t see how a society like the USA in which so many men are involved in pornagraphy can possibly be expected to have a voting majority capable of rational judgement. This scourge is destroying marriages, breaking up families, and really messing up the culture.
We need to get organized fighting it. Any hotel that provides porn in its rooms for the visiting businessmen — boycott them. Start pressuring the government to enforce anti-porn laws.

I always mean to tell you ahead of time to enable JavaScript. Since your nom de tune suggests that you would appear to be in our country on an indefinite Visa (I assume you get cache back upon closing each browsing session), I would also suggest installing Expat Shield, which also enables you to watch BBC-TV programs live stateside; not to shock you, but, I say, that’s not a joke, (Chan)son (in other words, I’m not pulling your Leghorn).

“In the evening, it gets covered in wine.”

That reminds me of when, during the brief stained-glass window between Vatican Not and Vatican II they used to include a 1 tsp foil-tub of margarine with the communion wafer, until the Pope, a cafeteria Keynesian prone to counterencyclical fiscal policy, decided to enact a tax on transubstantion fats and spend it on public works of salvation, requiring a switch to I Vatican’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

“It’s a damn good thing I don’t watch web porn. I’d be going through a monitor a week!”

I recommend switching to a Christian Science monitor – not only do you get more on-screen reading room that way, but when your PC gets a virus, there’s no need to download Norton Disk Doctor.

“Oops – I submitted too quickly.”

Right before saying, no doubt, “I swear this has never happened before”, which excuse comes in equally handy, now you mention it, when your hard drive proves unable to boot up in the first place.

“I was going to add … no, no, don’t stop, don’t stop. I love it!”

And so you did. As it is written in the Song of Solomon, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Or was that Abbey Road to Damascus?

The dread of ones family finding one’s vast stash of porn is indeed a powerful one.

Which is of course why we now have incognito browsing and encrypted external hard drives whose contents will remain an eternal mystery even if you die or are permanently incapacitated – as long as you made sure to not write down the password.

Isn’t the capitalism you love a wonderful enabler of the depravity you hate….

That reminds me of when, during the brief stained-glass window between Vatican Not and Vatican II they used to include a 1 tsp foil-tub of margarine with the communion wafer, until the Pope, a cafeteria Keynesian prone to counterencyclical fiscal policy, decided to enact a tax on transubstantion fats and spend it on public works of salvation, requiring a switch to I Vatican’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

Ugh…never let it be said that conservatives lack a sense of humor, albeit a terrible one…

Funny thing is, in the circles where I regularly associate, porn considered no big deal (depending on the laws of the state I happen to find myself, it’s not unusual to walk into a bar and see hardcore stuff out in public on the TV).

So what’s my dirty little secret that I hide from the world in my shame? Conservative blogs and websites (with, however, the important proviso that I do keep both hands firmly on the mouse and keyboard while reading Mr. Dreher)

“Pornography is a big issue in the confessions of men” says little and means less. Are these men self-hating and shamed in a true “addiction”, or are they normal guys admitting to the biological equivalent of burping because their religion makes a big deal out of it and they respect it enough to tell the truth?

It is beyond dispute that addiction alters your brain chemistry. It is likewise beyond dispute that pretty much everything can be addictive, and thus that one person’s weakness for, say, alcohol does not say anything about the casual consumer.

Dread of being found out? Don’t look under my mattress? Pithy and amusing concerns but how old school.

That’s not even a concern to contemporary pr0n-mongers. As Roger pointed out, incognito/private browsing has “liberated” them from being discovered. Heck, there’s even incognito browsing available on cellphones now. Pr0n it up, fools!